The joy of statistics

I recently bought myself a Fitbit to track my step count and sleep, and realised that I really love looking at all the graphs and statistics it gathers on my sleep, steps, floors climbed, and activity levels. And now I realise that this fascination with statistics is something I enjoy in lots of my other activities!

One of the main ones is my blog stats – I’m addicted to checking these! When I relaunched my blog just over a year ago, the figures grew rapidly for a few months, and this gave me lots of motivation. Unfortunately it isn’t as good when the figures are not heading upwards!

Account tracker is an app that I use to record my spending and saving, and it's got loads of graphs and charts that help me to see if everything's on track. I've been using it religiously since the start of 2011. I use Memrise for tracking my Japanese language learning, and I'm sometimes tempted to get the paid version just because of all the graphs on my progress I'd get access to! I find that I hardly spend any time at all on Flickr now that I have the free account that doesn’t have statistics! I hadn't realised how much being able to see whether other people were viewing my photos improved my experience of the site.

For a few winters I kept statistics on my mood, energy, sleep, and how much light I’d had that day. It helped me to see that using my light box was making things better. I've just discovered all the graphs that are available online for my gas and electricity usage since I got my smart meter last August. I also love to catalogue changes in other ways – taking photos of my teeth since I got braces, so I can see the progress, is a good example of this.